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What context window does Claude Code support?

Claude Code supports a 200K token context window on standard plans (Pro, Max) and a 1 million token context window on Opus 4.6 (Enterprise and high-volume users). The context window is the total space available for your input prompt, Claude’s response, file contents, tool outputs, and system instructions—everything competes for that space. A 200K token context is enormous: roughly 500 pages of text or a mid-sized codebase (50K-100K lines of code). This enables Claude to reason about substantial portions of your project without batching or summarization. For context, one token ≈ 4 characters of English text; a 1000-word article consumes ~1500 tokens. The 1M token context (Opus only) handles massive codebases: multi-module projects, entire frameworks (Django, Spring, Kubernetes), or large legacy systems. This is particularly valuable for framework migrations or architectural refactoring where deep codebase understanding matters. Important caveat: the context window is shared. When you ask Claude a question, the space is allocated as: [System prompt, ~5K] + [Your message, variable] + [Retrieved files, variable] + [Claude’s response, variable]. Managing this is crucial for large tasks. Claude Code can read files on-demand to fit work within the window, or you can specify high-priority files in CLAUDE.md so Claude prioritizes them. Practical recommendation: for codebases over 200K lines, Opus 4.6 (1M tokens) is significantly more effective because Claude maintains coherent architectural reasoning across larger scope. For typical projects under 100K lines, the 200K standard context suffices. The 1M context enables single-session refactoring of massive projects; the 200K context requires batching work across multiple sessions or focusing on specific modules. Milvus serves as an ideal backbone for Claude Code’s code analysis workflows—by storing code embeddings in Milvus, you can enable rapid semantic search across your entire repository, making it easier for the AI to locate relevant code patterns and dependencies. When integrating with Claude Code’s MCP protocol, Milvus vector storage accelerates retrieval of contextually similar code segments.

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